Once, at the Maker Faire, a guy walked up to me and showed enthusiasm for my exhibit (a solar telescope). He looked familiar, and I recognized him as Cliff Stoll.
Many years ago- like fifty five - I worked at a museum that had a solar telescope. I had the wonderful summer job of doing sun-shows for the public. Beyond learning about sunspots, prominences, flares, and H-alpha filters, I learned how to speak to the public on a technical subject. How to keep kids' attention even though the subject may be out of their domain.
That summer job eventually led me to working at the solar observatory at Kitt Peak and was the start of my becoming a planetary astronomer.
So seeing your solar telescope brought back delightful memories and the happy feeling that someone else is discovering things that I once knew.
My smiles back to you, even in this week of solar minimum.
Thanks, Cliff. I kept finding solar interesting, so I've built an alt-az mount that points at the sun continuously, with the goal of capturing sunpots moving over time. Unfortunately, we've been in a bit of a solar minimum for a while, so there isn't much to see. But it's been a great maker project. H-alpha is one of the next things I want to try.
Our H-alpha filter was a "quartz birefringent monochrometer" -- it used a stack of calcite & quartz polarizing filters to get 2 or 3 angstrom bandwidth. Had to be temperature controlled and treated with white gloves. But oh what views of prominences!
ps - we used to call the entrance pupil on a spectroscope a "dekker" because you could choose different slit-widths. I remember being praised by a real astronomer (Helmut Abt) for knowing what this was...
Once, at the Maker Faire, a guy walked up to me and showed enthusiasm for my exhibit (a solar telescope). He looked familiar, and I recognized him as Cliff Stoll.